Name one bad emotion you’ve felt.
If you are like most people, you mentioned anger. Or guilt. Or envy. Or pride. Or resentment. Or sadness.
None of those emotions is inherently a bad one. All emotions do is show you something you might otherwise be missing.
Anger shows you where you have cared, since you rarely get angry about something you don’t care about. Envy shows you an unresolved insecurity hiding in plain sight. Guilt (and sometimes shame) show you where there is a gap between the values you claim to hold yourself to, and what you did.
In some cases, two or more of these emotions dance together to give you a cocktail. Resentment shows you how fear and sadness and dishonesty are living rent-free in your relationship. Communication is a pipe that emotions flow through; resentment shows you that that pipe is clogged because one of you is afraid to have that talk.
Many of these emotions are difficult to process. So many don’t.
Instead, we restrict ourselves from feeling the anger and allow it to devolve. We turn anger into a bad fuel that burns us up from the inside.
Restricting an emotion drains us more than the emotion itself.
If we choose to do the difficult work of sitting with those feelings, feeling them through without resisting any, without directing any at others, then we get to enjoy the beauty they’ve been masking all along.
Feeling sadness helps us get better. Blocking it only blocks you from feeling joy.